


Grace

by futurelounging



Series: FuLo's Other Outlander Tales [4]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 13:06:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15686022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futurelounging/pseuds/futurelounging
Summary: Mary McNab remembers the hardships of her life and her experience with the Murrays and Frasers.





	Grace

The devil had taken hold of him. What other power could urge vile and vicious actions? Surely his soul had been made free to the darkness and the darkness did inhabit him, guiding his fists upon my cheek, my ribs, before I learned. A child is not so fortunate. The learning does not come quickly. And worse still, my son had the bold strength of his ancestors, fighting the devil himself with defiance. And he earned bruises upon bruises. Hair torn from his head.   

The Lord did test us mightily. And we held ourselves, Rabbie and I, steadfast.

The Laird’s return breathed new life into the land. The spirit of Frasers past carved into his shape, and at his hand stood his foreign wife, the glowing healer and wild spirit. She saw the darkness and cried out at it, like none I’d known before. As if her words could battle the devil himself.

I felt, with their arrival, some kind of hope, but soon swallowed it bitterly. Darkness is most evident when light is there to shine upon it. My husband’s festering darkness drove him to betrayal, and my heart cleaved as word came of the Laird’s deportation to Wentworth, of his wife’s sorrow and grief. Mistress Murray spit flames from her tongue to the injustice.

God did send his wrath finally, in the flames that cleansed this world of my husband and his treachery. We wept for our lost home, for the lost Laird, for the lost hope.

I’d not imagined when we moved to Lallybroch that I would be absorbed into that family as though a long-lost relation. In the early days of their generosity I found the simple pleasure of greeting another without fear. Of pride in my work and no room for scorn. I watched my son grow and no longer hide.

And then, as my pride began to take hold, God did remind me again of the fragile peace of our souls. My boy fell and shook, his limbs stiff as wood, tongue bleeding caught in his teeth. Again, and again. And I drew my knees across the rough hewn stones of the chapel and pleaded for God to forgive whatever darkness his father had left in him, to offer respite to his innocent soul. And it was then that I learned why God had given the Laird this foreign wife. She had come as an angel. As the divine presence of God’s forgiveness of my husband’s actions. She was grace.

She gave to me a blessed stone to sew into Rabbie’s coat, to protect him from the darkness that rattled his body. And though the darkness would come again, it would not take his soul. She should have hated me for my husband’s sins, but she offered me peace instead.

I watched them from the kitchen more than once, in the days before it all fell apart. I had seen between them some truth I knew but had never felt. I recognized it and wondered why it had evaded me. Their touches were deliberate and soft. No such touch I had known other than holding Rabbie as a bairn. I had looked at him that way.

Sorrow is now the air of this land, inescapable and cold. The joy that surprises us is always haunted by the pain of the loss. Of our men and boys cut down, drained of life upon a moor. The sorrow infects our hearts as we hold ourselves still instead of tearing apart the redcoats when they tear apart our homes and leave our pantries bare. The heartiest of us breathes heavily under the weight of this sorrow.

What is loss when you have nothing to mourn? No cairn, no stone, no body to lay to rest. He walked through the family stones whenever he returned from the cave though she was not there, his words fewer and fewer with each visit. His body sinking into itself, wishing to disappear. I’d seen him for most of his life and now I watched as he was swallowed by sorrow, no longer recognizable as the man who stood proudly on the steps of his great home with his arms around her.

As a child I pressed my body into my father’s as he told stories before the fire in the evenings. The rise and fall of his chest moving my small frame up and down in a steady rhythm. Touch was love and peace and safety. And then, when I had grown and was meant to care for a man, I felt only touch as possession and pain. I held my boy’s small frame against mine, watching it rise and fall as I breathed, and prayed he would only remember this touch.

I would never forget the sacrifices made for me and my boy. Never be able to repay them. But I tried. When Mrs. Murray told me of the plan to turn him in, to end his exile as he wished it, my heart broke for the injustice. Men held above all else their exacting hands - punitive, vengeful, and eternal. After all this time, his own prison was not enough.

I had lived in a prison, kept afraid and lonely and broken. I knew him, this part of him that ached for touch, that would draw hope from a moment of quiet beauty. And I knew I finally could give something to take with him, to give him a shred of hope in the darkness.

His face upon seeing me was softer than I’d seen in it years, the concern of my presence, his defenses shredded and thin. If he had refused me, I’d feel no less grateful that I had summoned the courage to offer. But he did accept, with reluctance and pain. I let him place the pain in my palms and carried it in my fist for him for the rest of my days. And when he finally touched me, that soft touch of his fingertips asking questions of my skin, I knew no sorrow. And when we joined it was not desire that shook our bodies, but the glowing truth of grace.


End file.
